One of my friends recently mentioned that he had completely switched over to Live Search (from Google). This was a particularly pleasant surprise to me because when Live Search 2.0 shipped I sent mail to friends and family urging them to give it a try. I did this only after becoming comfortable that it wouldn’t backfire on me, with everyone upset that I’d sent them off to an inferior solution.

For the last year I’ve been using a tool that performs side-by-side searches on Live Search and another search engine. For Live Search 1.0 I found I preferred the results from Google about 70% of the time. For Live Search 2.0 the numbers flipped around and I prefer Live Search 70% of the time (and most of the remaining 30% is a tie). It’s so dramatically better that I have to force myself to continue to use the side-by-side tool (and provide feedback to the Search team when they aren’t doing as well as another search engine) rather than just use Live Search.

Now if we can just get a few hundred million more people to make Live Search their search engine of choice….